LLVM is the compiler infrastructure that underlies Clang, Vuo, and many other projects. It’s a set of libraries to help you build compilers (and more). Among other things, LLVM provides a C++ API for generating LLVM Intermediate Representation (LLVMIR) code. LLVMIR is an assembly language for a hypothetical computer. LLVMIR code can be either interpreted or compiled down to native code.

So LLVM provides this C++ API for generating LLVMIR code — but it doesn’t stop there. LLVM can also generate C++ code that generates LLVMIR code. In other words, LLVM can literally write part of your compiler for you! [more...]

With Vuo, non-programmers will be able to create their own multimedia software for interactive art and music performances, animations, visualizations, games, special effects, museum exhibits, kiosks and other artistic projects. Rather than writing code in a traditional computer language, the composer will drag and drop building blocks onto a canvas, connecting those blocks with cables to create the composition. Unlike most programming environments, artists will be able to interact with their Vuo compositions while they are running, allowing for live improvisation. [more...]

Kosada is working on a cool new project that’s built on top of Clang and its underlying framework, LLVM. While using Clang for this project, I’ve been pleased to see how simple it is to write code that builds other code. Simple in retrospect, anyway! The code I wrote turned out to be simple, but it took lots of digging through the Clang source code to figure out what to write. So here’s my first contribution to the Clang community: two examples of using the Clang API to build code programmatically. [more...]

Here’s a way to create a View (Drupal 7, Views 3.x) that lets you browse an arbitrarily-deep taxonomy hierarchy. With this type of browser you can link, oh, say, a large collection of videos, or photo galleries, or any kind of huge list of content categorized in a nested tree.

Let me introduce you to the best language you’ve never heard of: Objectivist-C.

Although academic computer scientists have generally dismissed Objectivist-C, it has a zealous following among self-taught programmers and college sophomores.

Objectivist-C was invented by Russian-American programmer Ope Rand. Based on the principle of rational self-interest, Objectivist-C was influenced by Aristotle’s laws of logic and Smalltalk. In an unorthodox move, Rand first wrote about the principles of Objectivist-C in bestselling novels, and only later set them down in non-fiction.

Need to store up some items and process them en masse in a cron job? That’s a perfect use case for the Queue API (for Drupal 7+) or the drupal_queue module (the backport for Drupal 6).

Concrete example: One of our consulting clients was using a synchronous webservice for their retail store locator. We needed to create a form where store owners could change whether they’re listed in the store locator. When a store owner submits the form, should she have to wait around while our site sends her change to the store locator webservice? We didn’t think so. So we decided to use Drupal’s Queue API, which lets us save up all the store owners’ changes and send them to the webservice in a batch.

Here’s a simple example of adding items to a queue in a form submit handler and processing them in the next cron run. [more...]

“You should read this book,” a friend told me. “It says that women don’t make as much as men because they don’t negotiate their salaries.”

The book was Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide, by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, published in 2003. The notion that “women don’t make as much as men because they don’t negotiate their salaries”, it turns out, is a myth — a myth spun from the sloppy science and sexist assumptions of Women Don’t Ask. [more...]

When you’re getting started with iOS development, it’s hard to figure out those first steps. What developer tools do you need? What are some good tutorials to start with? Where to begin delving into Apple’s thousands of pages of documentation?